ABC and Move Networks released their May streaming numbers today, reporting 37 million videos served during the month, a total of 815 million minutes. 400 million streame have been served since ABC launched their full episode player in 2006.
Meanwhile, a commenter over on Lost Remote claiming to be from an ABC affiliate makes it clear that local stations are less than thrilled with ABC’s portal strategy:
Dear ABC.com staff,
Affiliates love the video player. It’s a great opportunity for us to be contractually obligated to place hard-coded links on our homepage to drive traffic to your video player. Everyone knows that the homepage is the only way people enter a website because bookmarking a specific section within a site or grabbing content from a site via RSS is so 2006, right?
Could you please be a little bit more Johnny-on-the-Spot with hard data on traffic numbers for the player in our markets so we can make money off those numbers through interstitials and such? Telling us “that information isn’t available to affiliates” and then maybe changing that tune and parceling out a nugget of data after each ratings period doesn’t really help us sell the player year ’round.
We like how you’ll be able to embed and share content in blogs and stuff. Any chance you’ll give some of that eyeball opportunity to the affiliates?
Sincerely,
Rob
Back in 2006 ABC signed a deal whereby affiliates could stream and sell ads on full episodes delivered directly on their sites but in early 2007 a number of affiliates turned to WorldNow to facilitate local ad-serving.
Apparently despite the strong overall numbers from ABC and the ability of Move Networks and BlackArrow to do local geotargeting and ad serving not all affiliates feel they are getting the local service and data they need.